Media Coverage and the War in Iraq

Leading media experts from print, radio, and television explore questions arising from the media’s coverage of the war in Iraq. Journalists trained in military skills and embedded with our troops? Live broadcasts of bombings? Is the media working to be the ultimate informant, or is it simply providing us with a new form of “Reality TV?” Dr. James Walsh, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, moderates. This event was sponsored by WorldBoston, a non-profit, non-partisan, membership organization committed to engaging and informing Boston citizens through community dialogue, networking, and public education, in an effort to encourage their involvement in global issues.

7 NEWS General Assignment Reporter Mike Macklin reports for 7 NEWS and has covered a wide range of major stories of both local and national interest. Macklin’s reporting for 7 NEWS and his correspondence for the NBC NewsChannel have taken him all over the country. Before coming to 7 NEWS in 1994, Macklin worked for more than 10 years as a reporter-anchor at WBZ-TV and WBZ-AM in Boston. At WBZ-TV, Macklin was responsible for political reporting, covering local, state and national elections, presidential primaries and party nominating events. He also was a general assignment reporter, as well as the anchor for Sunday mid-day newscast. Macklin has been nominated for a New England Emmy award for individual achievement in news reporting.

David Beard has been a reporter and editor for the past 27 years. He worked abroad as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press and was deputy foreign editor, regional editor, and assistant managing editor for The Boston Globe. He has been the editor of Boston.com, one of the nation’s biggest newspaper-based web sites, since September 2006. Beard also teaches news writing at the Harvard Extension School and is on the board of the school’s journalism masters program. He was an Inter American Press Association scholar in Argentina and is a graduate of Northwestern University.

Since Greater Boston‘s debut in January of 1997, host and executive editor Emily Rooney has brought her journalistic credentials and deep knowledge of Boston to the program. Emily was director of political coverage and special events at Fox Network in New York from 1994 to 1997. Prior to that, she was executive producer of ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Before that, Emily worked at WCVB-TV in Boston for 15 years, from 1979 to 1993, where she served as news director for three years and as assistant news director before that. Since being with Greater Boston, Emily has picked up a number of awards, including the prestigious National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism, a series of New England Emmy Awards, and Associated Press recognition for Best News/Talk show for Beat the Press and Greater Boston.

Jeb Sharp has been reporting for The World since 1998. Her assignments have taken her to Africa, Europe and the Middle East. She covers foreign policy and human rights and is currently working on a historical series about how wars end. Her radio stories have been honored by the Overseas Press Club and the Society of Professional Journalists. Jeb was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 2006. She learned how to do radio at the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley and began her career at KCAW-FM in Sitka, Alaska. She has also worked at WBUR in Boston.

Dr. Jim Walsh is an expert in international security and a Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Walsh’s research and writings focus on international security, and in particular, topics involving weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Dr. Walsh has testified before the United States Senate on the issue of nuclear terrorism and chaired the Harvard University International Working Group on Radiological Terrorism. Since 2001, Dr. Walsh has given some 700 media interviews, including more than 300 appearances on CNN. His comments and analysis have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Times of London, the Christian Science Monitor and numerous other publications. He has appeared on the CBS Evening News, NPR, PBS, Fox, MSNBC, the Discovery Channel, MTV, Al Jazeera, and outlets in more than a dozen countries. His film credits include Testament (2004), Meltdown (2004), and Fortress Australia (2002). Before coming to MIT, Dr. Walsh was Executive Director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He was also a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the country’s three nuclear weapons labs. Previously, he was named a Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar by the United States Institute for Peace and won the Hubert Humphrey Fellowship from the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Dr. Walsh received his Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.